1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to reusable software application development systems and methods, and more particularly to a computer system for performing reusable software application development from a set of declarative executable specifications.
2. Description of the Related Art
For several years computer software applications have been written to improve the productivity of individuals inside an enterprise, such as a company or firm. Even from the early days of computers, software applications have been developed to provide faster payroll processing, improved record-keeping, management of sales, and increase the speed of research and development. With these so-called internal applications in place for decades, studies indicate that enterprises have been able to significantly improve employee productivity.
Moreover, since the advent and widespread use of the Internet and the World Wide Web (“the Web”), there has been a desire by the management in these enterprises to extend their internal application functionality and technology infrastructure to external parties, such as their customers, partners, vendors, suppliers, and other constituents. For example, instead of a salesperson taking an order over the telephone and then entering that order into the internal company sales software application, enterprises are now allowing their own constituents to create orders directly into their internal applications by allowing access to the enterprise's systems through the Web. This is called extending the enterprise.
Over time, enterprises have discovered that the more they extend their internal infrastructures to external parties, the better return on their investment of their infrastructure. Furthermore, extending the enterprise now refers to the rapid creation of simple or complex applications that connect to legacy and existing systems and allow customers, suppliers, vendors, partners, and all constituents to transact business with an enterprise at reduced cost by directly accessing an enterprise's internal computer system(s). This form of application development, which is referred to as an Internet or Web development, has new engineering challenges including security, quality, and maintenance. Developments in Internet software have surfaced in several different areas ranging from on-line shopping and banking to collaborative research and instant messaging. Web-based tools have helped to partially bridge the gap between the Web pages of the early Web and sophisticated Internet-based applications. However, while significant progress has been made in the development of Internet applications, conventional application development tools for the Internet still have many shortcomings, especially for the mission-critical use that most Web applications are now deployed.
Moreover, existing development environments and languages treat the problem domains of specifications, design, testing, coding, runtime evaluation, and implementation documentation separately. With conventional tools, prototyping, creating functional specifications, design, testing, coding, execution, and documentation are usually performed by different groups from different disciplines within an enterprise. However, by failing to provide a unified system and methodology from which a single set of declarative commands can create specifications, documentation, testable components, and executable code, conventional systems often require more work to be performed, utilizing more experienced and higher number of human resources, and often resulting in multi-component software integration that produces lower quality software. While existing development environments provide for some reuse within an application, they simply fail to allow for reuse across applications and projects. For instance, some components can be shared and reused within an application in these conventional environments. However, across projects, reusing the same components becomes difficult or impossible due to the design of conventional development environments and architectures.
While the conventional development processes once provided a valuable system of creating multi-components of business systems, there remains a need for a new automated reusable software application development system which provides a uniform framework for describing the various components or facets of business systems using simple declarative constructs that even inexperienced programmers can create and yet achieve quality attributes of systems that senior level architects and engineers often produce.